From The Brad Blog written by guest blogger Steve Heller of VelvetRevolution.us:

The Republican IT guru, recently described [2] as a “high tech Forrest Gump” for his proclivity to be “at the scene” of so many troubling elections since 2000, and even at the heart of the “lost” White House email scandal, has been ordered by a federal judge to appear for an under-oath deposition next Monday in Ohio.

The BRAD BLOG [3] has learned that Mike Connell, the Republican IT guru whose company, GovTech Solutions, created Ohio’s 2004 election results computer network, appeared in federal court today, as compelled, and has been ordered to appear for his deposition on Monday, November 3, just 24 hours before Election Day 2008.

Today’s court order came after a contentious hearing, at which Connell was present. The hearing was part of a long-standing voting rights violations lawsuit, King Lincoln v. Blackwell [4], as previously covered by The BRAD BLOG [5] and by Velvet Revolution’s Election Protection Strike Force here [6] and here [7].

Though Connell’s attorneys have fought to quash the subpoena, recently issued after the judge lifted a stay on the case several weeks ago, it looks like his options to avoid testimony, or at least jail for avoiding it, may have come to an end. The attorneys in the case have said that Connell’s testimony may well lead to the subpoenaing and under-oath questioning of Karl Rove, who, they say, would be unable to use Executive Privilege as an excuse to avoid such a subpoena in a civil RICO case…
For the rest of the article click here
From today’s Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s start where I haven’t seen much mention, and that is this man, Mike Connell, in Ohio, testifying. Who is he? What is his relevance to the big day, to Election Day tomorrow?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, this event in a courtroom in Columbus may be one of the most important things to happen in this whole election and may be one of the most important things to happen in American history. I mean, this sounds hyperbolic, I know, but it is true.

Mike Connell is—has been named as Karl Rove’s computer guru since 2000. The lawyers in the case refer to Connell as a high-IQ Forrest Gump, because he’s been on the scene of every dubious election we’ve had over the last eight years, starting with Florida 2000.

Now, he has been named by a man named Stephen Spoonamore, S-P-O-O-N-A-M-O-R-E, who’s a very unusual and particularly unimpeachable kind of whistleblower. He’s a conservative Republican; he’s a former McCain supporter. But above all, he is a renowned and highly successful expert at the detection of computer fraud. He works for big banks. He works for foreign governments, the Secret Service. His job is to figure out how computers are used to steal money or information or votes. Well, he’s named a lot of people in the Bush-Cheney election subversion conspiracy. He has worked with them. He knows them personally. And months ago, he named Mike Connell and his company GovTech Solutions as having played a crucial role in the—basically the electronic subversion of the vote in Ohio in 2004. And Spoonamore has actually described the computer architecture that was used to do this.

Now, on the strength of this testimony, the lawyers in the case had the judge issue a subpoena to Mike Connell last week. Connell defied the subpoena; he was in contempt. Late last week, the lawyers filed a motion to compel compliance, and to everyone’s surprise and delight, the judge ordered Connell to appear today and to be deposed for two hours about his role in this longstanding electronic plot, basically, to flip votes towards the Republicans.

Some of this deposition will be sealed, and I have to tell you the part that’ll be sealed. Apparently, Rove has threatened Connell. He told him that if Connell did not take the fall for this whole thing, the Department of Justice would start investigating Connell’s wife Heather for improper lobbying practices. Now, that part of the deposition we’re not going to know the answers to. But what’s astonishing to me
For the Whole Interview click here

Allen Raymond explains the GOP’s dirty tricks—and warns about what to expect between now and November.  In How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative.

Convicted felon Allen Raymond recalls his life as a liar and a cheat. He was a campaigner for the Republican Party, sucking up to the GOP for one reason: a lot of money. After earning a master’s degree in political science, Raymond created an independent consulting firm, selling his insider’s experience and knowledge of political manipulation. In 2000 a former colleague named James Tobin—then the Regional Political Director of the Republican National Committee—hired Allen Raymond to conduct some political sabotage. Not surprisingly, his employers disavowed any knowledge of Raymond’s black ops once he was exposed.

HUSTLER: Tell us about the dirty trick you carried out in New Hampshire in 2000.

ALLEN RAYMOND: My job was to make sure that the Democratic Party’s phone operation on Election Day got shut down, so no calls could go out or in, which we did.

You jammed the phone lines?
Yes. You call in for information. “Where do I vote?” “What time do the polls close?” Or even “Can I get a ride to the polls?” It got shut down, so no calls could go out or in. We did this for an hour-and-a-half, then the operation got shut down by the client, who got nervous. I didn’t think that much of it until the FBI showed up, and it became a criminal investigation. I told them everything I knew—which led to my conviction and three months imprisonment.

And you were the one who was sacrificed?
Yes, they threw me under the bus—then blamed me for getting run over. It was clear they wanted me to be the scapegoat. The Republican National Committee spent $3 million defending my coconspirator, the guy who originally gave me a call about the thing.

You are convinced that this went to the highest levels of government—approved from very high up.
I had worked at the Republican National Committee as a Regional Political Director, which was the same job my coconspirator, Jim Tobin, had when he called me to do the work. I understand how the RNC works. Something like this never sees the light of day unless it’s been vetted by an attorney. Now, when you have the same political party in the White House, the White House therefore controls the committee. Melman, Martinez, all these guys get appointed by the President.

Is it fair to speculate that Karl Rove would have been involved in this?
I got the sense that this was kind of a beta test: “Go get a vendor, a subcontractor, who is disposable, and if it works, great; maybe we wheel it out in other places. And if a criminal investigation ensues, there’s plausible deniability, and you cut the guy loose.” As far as it going directly to Rove, I’ve got no evidence of that. I asked the Executive Director at the New Hampshire Republican State Committee how he came up with the idea, and he said, “I used to be in the military. They taught us [about] disrupting lines of communication.”

Let’s be clear on “jamming the phone lines.” Were you actually interfering with a person’s ability to vote?
Not exactly. The statute I was charged u n d e r w a s “phone  harassment”—calling someone with the intent to annoy or harass. My coconspirator went in front of a jury, pled not guilty, got ten months. The First District Court reversed the decision. They said, “It’s evident that he was involved…however, the statute doesn’t fit the crime. Nowhere have you proven the defendant had an intent to annoy or harass anybody.” So it may be there is no statute that covers what we did. It’s not an election law violation, not a civil rights violation. We’re talking shades of gray. We didn’t call anybody’s house, so I didn’t call Jane Smith, a Democratic voter in Ward One in Manchester.

Your barrage of phone calls to the Democratic headquarters prevented anyone from calling out or receiving other calls, right?
Yes. Of people who are registered, less than half actually vote. You’ve got to remind them, because you look for every advantage. Parties allocate millionns doing what’s called “Get out the vote”—GOTV. It’s to remind people, “Tuesday’s the election; you’ve got to vote.” If you shut down a phone bank for ten hours, you could have an effect of several thousand votes not getting cast.

Since the RNC defended your coconspirator, why didn’t they defend you as well?
I never asked them to, so it might be as simple as that political rule, you know, “Don’t ask; don’t get.” When the police contacted me, I called my coconspirator and said, “I just got a call from law enforcement about the phone program I did for you.” His response was, “What are you talking about?”

So they were hanging you out to dry?
Their first reaction was, “We don’t know who this company is. We’ve never heard of them.” Later it was, “He’s a rogue; we hired him to do something else.” And then later still: “He stole our money; we want our money back.” So they went from calling me nonexistent to a rogue to a liar to a thief. My speculation would be—since the guy later became  the New England Chairman of the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign of 2004—he knew a lot of stuff that they didn’t want him telling the Feds.

You’re talking about Jim Tobin?
Correct. So he served seven months in jail, but now he’s back working for the Republican Party.

Can you talk about your dealings with Karl Rove?
There are two instances. I was working for Mitch McConnell at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Rove was their direct-mail vendor. I didn’t know that at the time when I went in with a direct-mail plan. It was like some animal instinct. I laid this plan on the table. He immediately walked in, looked at the plan, took it. I continued my conversation with the candidate. Rove typed on his laptop, turned it around and said, “The direct-mail plan is going to look something like this,” then took my plan and stuck it in his pocket. He got up, and his body language was, “Now you get the fuck out of here ’cause this is my meal ticket.” The other interaction was when I went down to the Austin headquarters in 2000 for the Bush-Cheney campaign. I went to this office floor filled with cubicles, and in the middle was this room encased in glass. It was Rove with all these monitors and eadphones and computers, the place aglow. I thought, This guy knows where every resource of his campaign is, and he’s orchestrating it.

What other types of election rigging are you personally aware of?
There’s two types of rigging an election. One type is like the phone jamming. I’ll give you another example. You’ve seen it in the [2008] Presidential campaign. Say your candidate has taken a contribution from a questionable source. With most people, the reaction is either you give the money back and suffer the consequences or keep the money and suffer the consequences. But there’s a third way: get that same questionable donor to give a donation to your opponent—small enough to go unnoticed by his campaign, but big enough to get disclosed in a Federal Election Commission Campaign Disclosure Report. When the attack comes, and your opponent says, “You took money from a dirty source,” you say, “So did you. What’s the point?” It muddles the whole thing, derails the attack and makes the issue go away. Another example is manipulating bigotry. You saw it in South Carolina in the Democratic primary and over the years in Republican primaries. Whether it’s John McCain’s adopted daughter—who was from Bangladesh—being attacked as black or Bill Clinton saying that “Reverend Jackson did well in South Carolina in ’84” and trying to reduce Obama to “the black candidate”—which by the way, has other implications, like conjuring up memories of Jackson’s “Hymietown” quote. Race is a hot-button issue. I pressed that button, calling white Democratic households with a stereotypical urban-accented black male voice, a “scary black man,” to dissuade them from voting for their Democratic candidate. You’re tapping into whatever bigotry is in that household. It could be a white candidate; the race doesn’t matter. If you call a white household, particularly a white Democratic household, with a recorded voice saying, “Don’t forget that the Democratic candidate is great,” or whatever, what you say doesn’t matter; it’s how you say it. If you say it with an intimidating black voice, you’re going to trigger a bigoted reaction so that voter says, “I’m not voting for that guy. He’s got a scary black guy working for him, and I don’t like it that he called my house.”

Are there other variations?
Republicans are good at financing Green Party candidates through contributions. Then you call Democratic households and say, “Vote Green, vote your convictions, ’cause you’re an environmentalist.”

So you’re siphoning the Democratic vote?
Right. Their money makes the Green candidate think he’s viable. I have no proof there’s Republican money funneled into campaigns like Ralph Nader’s, but that’s a perfect opportunity.

Do you consider yourself Republican?
I was a moderate. When I went to work at the RNC, Haley Barber was chairman, so I adopted their worldview. Now I won’t affiliate with a political party.

What can we expect to see as we lead up to the November elections?
The one rumor to watch is this idea that Senator Obama is a Manchurian candidate—Muslim, Madrassa-educated cell—this idea that he’s a Muslim fundamentalist. Plenty of people believe that. I’d be fascinated to find out how many. That’ll keep going right up to Election Day. You’ll see efforts to polarize voters along gender or race. There’s always someone in the Republican Party who’s up to no good.

Anybody from the Democratic Party trying  to enlist your services, for good or evil?
My answer to that is 1) no one’s ever going to hire me; and 2) why would I work for anybody who would? My book started as a vindictive rant. I hope it’s more than that now, more of a public service, just like that quote by Justice Brandeis: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Our man Greg Palast investigates more skullduggery at the polls.

Florida Congresswoman Katherine Harris once called me “twisted.” Well, Kate, after squeezing through the skewed, contorted sewage pipes of the voting system in your district—Florida’s 13th Congressional—I have to agree that I’m a bit bent out of shape—as twisted as the vote-counting system in Sarasota, your home county.

On November 7, 2006, in last year’s midterm elections, 17,846 voters in Sarasota drove to the polls, waited in line, then cast their vote for…nobody. At least that’s what the computers said. That’s one in six voters who—say the official computer printouts—simply did not make a choice in the hottest Congressional race in the nation, the one to pick a replacement for Harris. (She left the job to run for Senate.)

That’s how the Republican Party kept hold of Harris’s seat in Congress, by a dinky 369 votes—not counting those 17,846 “blank” ballots.

And there’s no way to count those votes, is there, Kate? Because, for the first time in Sarasota’s history, all voting was done on touch-screen computers. So it’s physically impossible to check those supposedly blank ballots: They’re floating lost in cyberspace.

Forever.

Funny thing about those 17,846 people who waited in line not to vote: Most of them were Democrats. I’m not guessing about that. The 52 precincts in Sarasota with the highest number of Democratic voters were the 52 precincts with the highest number of lost votes.
Nevertheless, a government panel certified the Sarasota election as fair and free of technical problems. The panel was headed by Governor Jeb Bush.

Night of the Uncounted 3.6 million missing votes

So big deal. One fixed race out of hundreds. Here’s the big deal: The 17,000 “blank” ballots in Sarasota were part of an avalanche of blank ballots cast across the USA.

A little-known fact about that stinky sausage called American democracy: On every Election Day there’s a whole lot of ballots that just aren’t counted. Millions, in fact. In the 2004 race between George W. Bush and John Kerry, a mind-blowing 3,600,080 ballots were cast—and never tallied.

That’s not a figure that dropped from a black helicopter. It comes from the raw data buried at the federal Elections Assistance Commission. They’re still toting up the AWOL ballots from the 2006 mid-terms—and it’s looking like another 3 million ballots just went ffftt!

So big deal. With roughly a hundred million voting nationwide, that’s only 3% or 4%. You expect those kinds of “glitches.” But not everyone’s ballot gets “glitched” the same.

According to a study by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, the chance your ballot will “spoil” if you’re black is 900% higher than if you’re a white voter. Hispanics are 500% more likely to get “glitched” than whites.

It makes a difference. In last year’s mid-terms, 69% of Hispanic voters chose Democrats, as did 91% of African-Americans. Do the racial arithmetic, and we can calculate that ballots sent to the Bermuda Triangle and other voting games cost the Democrats no less than five Congressional seats in the 2006 midterm elections in Florida, Wyoming, Ohio and New Mexico—where an astonishing 88% of votes uncounted were cast in Hispanic, black and Native-American precincts.

(While uncounted ballots cost Democrats some seats in the House of Representatives in 2006, the “no count” cost them the White House in 2004. George Bush’s supposed “victory” margin over John Kerry in New Mexico that year—just 5,988 votes—was a spit in the bucket compared to the 31,000 uncounted ballots that came, almost exclusively, from heavily Democratic precincts. Bush took Ohio and Iowa as well via suspiciously blank ballots.)

So big deal. That’s history, and the Democrats still took Congress last year. This is the big deal: The Republican Party leadership—aided by a few Democratic quislings—is quietly, systematically, pumping up the no-count machinery for next year’s battle for the White House.

The Uncle Wiggily Strategy for 2008

In the bad old days of Jim Crow segregation, some yahoo politicians stood in the polling station doorways to block voters of color. Now the game is a lot more subtle: a series of obstacles to voting that will shave a few percentage points here and there, which Republicans believe will give them back the Congress and paint the White House a bright GOP red.

It’s a one, two, three combo of monkeying with registration rolls, playing games with the voting machinery and preventing recounts of questionable totals. At each step—registering, voting, counting—there’s a new obstacle, like the old kids game, Uncle Wiggily.

The Registration Obstacle Course

Registering used to be simple. Sign your name on a card and show up to vote. Now, fuggedaboutit. On January 1, 2006, a new law slipped onto the books by the Republican Congress allows secretaries of state, those partisan hacks who run voting in most states, to reject a registration applicant when they can’t verify the voter’s identity and citizenship.
Sounds reasonable, but it’s not—it’s a trick, a con, a cheat. In the run-up to the 2006 election, no less than 1.9 million Americans had their registrations flushed. Why? According to Arizona legislator Russell Pearce, one of the GOP’s pointmen in their block-the-vote drive, these new laws prevent “a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in the country.”

Really? Holy cow! A conspiracy to flood the voter rolls with the Brown Hordes of Juarez who’ve swum across the Rio Grande just for a chance to vote for Hillary Clinton!
Well, if these nearly 2 million rejected voters are illegals, then bust them, Sheriff Pearce! It should be easy to arrest alien voters—after all, their registrations include their addresses.

What’s going on here is a systematic blockade of the voter rolls, aimed at undoing registration drives among the 7 million Hispanic citizens who are not on voter rolls and other poor folk signed up in campaigns by black churches.

Citizens who produce a passport have no problem registering or voting, but only 23% of Americans have them. Driver’s licenses usually don’t count because they don’t prove citizenship. The Social Security Administration has failed to verify nearly half (46%) of the names sent to Washington because of computer problems—which the Bush team has no intention of fixing.

The Republican Secretary of State of California, for example, threw out 40% of the thousands of registration forms received in early 2006. Los Angeles County officials, in a rare move to protect citizen rights, laboriously hand-checked each voter’s identity, most of them Hispanic, and returned virtually every single rejected voter to the roll. But elsewhere in America it goes like this: Bring in your passport from your ski trip in the Alps, and you vote; bring in your Social Security card, and it’s tough luck, José!

The Blockade King

The Blockade King of 2006 was the madly partisan Secretary of State of Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell, despite lawsuits, refused to say how many registrants he had rejected—or on what grounds. On November 7, 2006, Blackwell’s secretive voter-roll game paid off, saving the Congressional seats of two Republicans—in Columbus and Cincinnati—despite the will of the voters.

Here’s how it worked. Many rejected citizens, believing they were registered, showed up, showed ID—and were turned away. If they bitched, they were allowed to vote on something called a “provisional ballot.” Then, per rules set down by Blackwell, every one of these provisional ballots was thrown out. The provisional ballots tossed were twice the sum of the Republican “victory” margins.

What the hell are these “provisional” ballots, anyway? It used to be that a ballot was a ballot. Then, in 2002, President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act. When George Bush says he’s going to “help” us vote, I get a bit worried. And there was a lot to worry about.

Provisional ballots, for example. They sound like a good idea: If a voter can’t find his name on the rolls, he can still vote, “provisionally,” until his status is checked after the polls close. One problem: The HAVA law says every voter has a right to demand a provisional ballot—but not the right to have that vote count. That’s left up to secretaries of state like Katherine Harris and Kenneth Blackwell.

In 2004 an eye-popping 3 million voters were shunted to provisional ballots—and over 1 million of these were thrown out as it suited these political hacks (see Ohio above). Did it make a difference? In Hamilton County (Cincinnati), where Republicans officially kept a Congressional seat by a dime-thin margin, investigators found that 95% of provisional ballots rejected came from urban, Democratic precincts of Cincinnati, only a smidgen from the white, Republican ’burbs. This suspiciously biased pattern was repeated across the nation.

The nationwide sweep of Democratic candidates may make vote heists a wee bit more difficult for the GOP. In Ohio, maniacally partisan Republican Blackwell—with his secret lists of rejected registrants—will be replaced by a Democrat, Jennifer Brunner. Though in Colorado, a battleground state for 2008, the Republicans kept hold of the Secretary of State’s office by less than 1 percent of a vote marred by a massive and suspect breakdown in the computer voting equipment. But while there are more good-government secretaries of state taking office, they all will work under the whip-hand of the Help America Vote Act. There’s no chance for a Democratic Congress, with its skinny majority, to overturn this measure. The 2008 race bodes to be the most polluted in decades.

The Baghdad Blackout

How did millions of voters get dumped in the “provisional” pile in the first place? After Bush signed HAVA, the GOP began secretly compiling what they called “caging lists”: hundreds of thousands of mainly black new voters to challenge on Election Day. When challenged, the voter got the heave-ho from the polling station or was handed a bogus “provisional” ballot.

Don’t all parties do that: challenge voters en masse? Absolutely not. Democrats stopped that game in 1965 after it became illegal to challenge a racially chosen group of voters.

How do I know about the GOP’s secret lists? I have a bunch. Someone at the Republican National Committee mistakenly sent these to GeorgeWBush.org instead of the party’s Web site for its honchos, GeorgeWBush.com. Uh, oh. The dot-org site was owned by pranksters who gleefully sent the lists on to my investigatory team working for BBC Television.

Turns out the Republicans were sending black soldiers first-class letters marked “Do Not Forward.” When the letters came back, the GOP used these to challenge their registrations or their absentee ballots. Where were the soldiers? Some were in Baghdad, of course.

Go to Baghdad, lose your vote. Mission accomplished, Mr. President.

And the game goes on. In 2006, pimple-faced young Republicans with Blackberries loaded with challenge lists invaded ghetto precincts to target new black voters. In 2008 expect more of these voter “lynchings by laptop.”

Robo-voting and other machine games

In 2000 about 700 voters in Gadsden County, the blackest in Florida, wrote in the name “Al Gore” on their ballots—enough to win Gore the Presidency. However, Kate Harris, then Secretary of State (and co-chair of the Bush campaign), ruled that the voters’ intent was unknown.

By 2006 the Florida GOP would take no chances: They eliminated paper and punch cards that could be recounted. In Sarasota—where the 17,000 votes would go missing—Republican Elections Supervisor Kathy Dent, despite the pleas of experts, installed computer touch-screens—whose tallies can’t be “recounted” and where missing votes remain missing forever in cyberspace. Indeed, when the public presented her with 14,000 signatures to demand paper ballots, Dent made a special presentation to the Sarasota Republican Committee to resist the protesters. She pleaded that the party needed machines that could not be recounted. Why?

I contacted the top independent expert on the iVotronics computers used in Sarasota, Douglas Jones of the University of Iowa, who said the strange differences between the look of the screens in some Democratic precincts versus Republican precincts could be explained partly by “corruption” of the “ballot image file.” That’s a fancy way for saying that the virtual “buttons” on the screen might not line up properly with touch-sensitive electronic targets hidden from view.

You can touch, punch or slam the square for your candidate, but the computer won’t feel it and record it unless you touch the screen, say, a half-inch further to the right. All these computer voting machines have a summary page to allow you to check and confirm your choices. But in Florida there was a second problem—a horribly designed graphic layout, making it difficult to find, let alone correct, any error in the vote in the congressional race.
Funny thing about these errors—they tended to work very much in favor of the Republican candidates. Sarasota’s Republican voting officials were notified of this design problem before Election Day.

Nonpartisan Florida elections supervisor Ion Sancho of Leon County (Tallahassee) told me, “If you’re going to have a ‘glitch’ bend an election, this is one way you could do it,” i.e. without getting caught deliberately finagling the results. The misalignment of virtual buttons and layout errors are far more subtle than the much-feared software tampering used to change Democratic votes to Republican. These seeming glitches merely shave votes, are often difficult to detect and it’s impossible to prove such file “corruption” was deliberate.

For some reason, computers prefer Republicans. The iVotronics touch-screens used in Florida are made by a company founded by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel—which cashed in big-time when Bush’s HAVA law set aside billions of dollars to change elections from paper ballots to paperless computers.

Obviously, the GOP finds robots do a better job of picking candidates than voters.

Greg Palast is the “twisted” author of the New York Times bestseller Armed Madhouse: How the Bush Posse Stole Your Vote, Shoplifted Iraq, and Seized Your Wallet. This article is based on the soon-to-be-published new edition.